11 ms·
The 'megacomet' Bernardinelli-Bernstein is the find of a decade
- astatine 5y agoSerendipity, or luck if you prefer, seems to play such a big role in these things.
- j_walter 5y agoI would say good timing versus luck. They didn't just happen upon it staring through a telescope at the right time...their research was setup to find objects similar to a comet but slightly further away from the sun than where they found it.
- RHSman2 5y agoSerendipity, or luck if you prefer, seems to play such a big role in things.
- cl42 5y agoWikipedia link for those who want more detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2014_UN271_(Bernardinelli-Bernstein) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2014_UN271_(Bernardinelli-Be...
- aunty_helen 5y agoThe important bit: > It will make its closest approach to Earth around 5 April 2031 at a distance of 10.11 AU The sad bit: > Once at perihelion, the comet is not expected to get brighter than Pluto (mag 13–16)... Even if it reaches the magnitude of Pluto, it will require about a 200 mm telescope to be visually seen
- vikingerik 5y agoFor reference, 10 AU is the distance of Saturn's orbit, that's why so dim, it's really not coming near the sun at all.
- malfist 5y agoFor those more familiar with photography than astronomy, 200mm referrers to the aperture of the telescope, not the focal length. This is a telescope roughly 8 inches in diameter. If you're looking to see it, Orion's XT8 would be a great starting telescope with aperture enough to see the comet
- ASalazarMX 5y ago200mm are 7.9 inches. Are the focal length and the diameter roughly the same?
- carl_dr 5y agoNot at all, my 9.25” telescope has a focal length of about 2.4 metres - a focal ratio of f/10. You’ll recognise f/x from camera lenses and such. The diameter does control how much light the telescope “swallows” though, you’ll need a larger telescope to see less bright objects (or longer exposures, although when you are using your eye, that has a limit of course!) So in this case, the post about is saying you’ll need something about 200mm diameter to see the comet. Anything smaller, and you’re just not getting enough light to see it.
- SAI_Peregrinus 5y agoThat said, if you don't care about seeing it in real time you can use a MUCH smaller lens and stack exposures. You'll likely want a star tracker (MASSIVE decrease in effort) to go with your camera, lens, tripod, intervalometer, and Bahtinov mask (cheap, makes focusing MUCH easier). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuMZG-SyDCU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuMZG-SyDCU is an excellent tutorial on how to do this without the tracker.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- malfist 5y agoNope. Focal length is how far the light has to travel, diameter is the aperture, or how big the opening is to collect light. The XT8 telescope I references has an 8 inch aperture, and a 1200mm focal length
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoSounds close enough in distance and far enough away in time that we could muster a robot intercept mission; would that be likely to be useful enough to warrant the cost?
- d_silin 5y agoYes, and there have been (unofficial) proposals. With SLS or Starship as launch vehicle a fast intercept mission is feasible within 10 years and no corners cut on mission design.
- notjustanymike 5y agoOne of the most exciting phrases uttered in Science isn't "Eureka!" but rather > "'This is weird — what is this thing?'"
- protomyth 5y agoJohn Ringo's Live Free or Die starts with a nice explanation: “It is said that in science the greatest changes come about when some researcher says "Hmmm. That's odd." The same can be said for relationships: "That's not my shade of lipstick . . ."—warfare: "That's an odd dust cloud . . ." Etc.”
- hodgesrm 5y ago--Fires in California: "That's a strange cloud..." Not making it up, this is exactly what we thought when the Oakland Hills fire of 1991 started. Our confusion was short-lived, I'm sad to say.
- CalChris 5y agoSame thing for me. I was having brunch in Pacifica and when I headed back to San Francisco, I saw this weird cloud where it shouldn't be. It was an otherwise clear day and it was blowing backwards, towards the ocean, due to whatever the Northern California equivalent of a Santa Ana wind is.
- QuercusMax 5y agoI think they're the Diablo winds in the Bay area?
- phkahler 5y agoToday at work: "What's that smell?" after a quick look around "There's a bit of smoke coming off that transformer." Bigger problem averted.
- 5y ago
- Jiro 5y ago"Megacomet" is exaggeration. Chiron, which is anomalous in its own way, is of similar size.
- himinlomax 5y agoChiron is not a comet.
- nnutter 5y agoWikipedia more-or-less disagrees with you.
- hunterb123 5y agoChiron is a planet. Chiron is a comet. "Wikipedia" agrees with both of those statements. Since it cannot be both, "Wikipedia" also agrees with the statements that Chiron is not a comet and is not a planet. tldr: we don't know, it could be either
- codezero 5y agoAlso, it's fair to say systems based on classification based on subjective criteria will always have grey area, so any absolute statement about them will be difficult to defend :)
- adolph 5y ago2060 Chiron /ˈkaɪərɒn/ is a small Solar System body in the outer Solar System, orbiting the Sun between Saturn and Uranus. Discovered in 1977 by Charles Kowal, it was the first-identified member of a new class of objects now known as centaurs—bodies orbiting between the asteroid belt and the Kuiper belt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2060_Chiron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2060_Chiron In Greek mythology, Chiron (/ˈkaɪrən/ KY-rən; also Cheiron or Kheiron; Ancient Greek: Χείρων means 'hand') was held to be the superlative centaur amongst his brethren since he was called the "wisest and justest of all the centaurs". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiron Chiron – A centaur with a white stallion body[9] and a son of Kronos. He is the mentor of Percy Jackson and the activities director at Camp Half-Blood. In The Lightning Thief, he first appears, disguised as a Latin teacher at Percy's school. He uses an enchanted wheelchair to conceal his horse half.[7] Chiron is played by Pierce Brosnan in the first film and by Anthony Head in the second film. In the musical, he is portrayed by Jonathan Raviv. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_characters_in_mythology_novels_by_Rick_Riordan#Immortals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_characters_in_mytholog...
- spenczar5 5y agoFor the HN crowd, it may be especially interesting to note that this was pretty much a software discovery. The dataset here was DES, the Dark Energy Survey. It’s a big dataset that has been around for a few years, and probably thousands of astronomers have worked with it. But its just a huge amount of data, covering a lot of the sky. Bernardinelli’s software discovered a blip in that big pile of data. He crunched through the dataset and got a weird answer for the size of the solar system (basically - its a bit more complicated). Almost everyone, when they get something like that, tweaks the parameters of their analysis code: “I must have the threshold for object detection set too low.” The real discovery comes from trusting the software and pursuing the question. This is a lot like software developers and their persistence. When your production service has a mysterious error in the logs, do you shrug and say “well, probably some transient network bug, it won’t matter” or do you dig in to understand what’s going on? Both approaches are reasonable, and it takes a balance of pragmatism and curiosity to be effective. But anyway - there is an increasing demand for applying rigorous software engineering techniques to astronomical datasets. A problem that we are facing in astronomy software today is that the datasets have gotten way too large for astronomers to just pull up images in DS9 and eyeball stuff to make sure it’s right, so they need software that is much more trustworthy and bug-free than before. —- Edit to add: DES data is completely public access: https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/the-des-project/data-access/ https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/the-des-project/data-access...
- AceJohnny2 5y agoI love this point, and I have to go on a tangent on this: > This is a lot like software developers and their persistence. When your production service has a mysterious error in the logs, do you shrug and say “well, probably some transient network bug, it won’t matter” or do you dig in to understand what’s going on? Both approaches are reasonable, and it takes a balance of pragmatism and curiosity to be effective. I find that it really depends on how harried I am. Am I (or someone on my team) able to dedicate time to this issue, or do we have other higher priority concerns? Every single time I can think of where we've had a "that's weird", it was a bug in the software. But it would take days to weeks for someone find the root cause (these were 1 in 100,000 race conditions), and we just can't afford to dedicate that amount of time to each. So we have to pick our battles.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- laylomo2 5y agoI enjoyed the writing of this article.
- barbazoo 5y agoWow I had to disable ublock origin and pi-hole to make that page load, wth.
- Macha 5y agoWeird, works for me with UBO + Firefox ETP + Privacy Badger
- codezero 5y agoThis is super cool. I studied comets for a while when I was in academia, and my favorite was one called Humason [0]. There are other great photos of it, some in google images, though the ones I had in the research lab in a a few books about comets were even more surprising. It had a very odd tail appearance because the comet tail is primarily created by an interaction with the solar wind / magnetic field, and at distances far from the Sun, that field is much weaker, so the tail becomes less straight, and this effect is even more pronounced when the comet is very large, as smaller comets just don't have an easy to detect visible tail from such great distances from Earth. Humason is less than half the size of this comet and is considered abnormally large. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Humason https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Humason
- Macha 5y ago> ("It's not like this is the Pedro and Gary show at all," Bernstein said. "In fact, we wanted the comet to be called Comet DES, but apparently that's against the rules.") Des is a name here (short for Desmond). Hacky alternate reality solution: Hire a guy named Des to have the comet "officially" named after.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NoGravitas 5y agoIs anyone else disappointed to learn that it won't be impacting the Earth?
- ncmncm 5y agoWhat I would like to know is whether there is any indication from the DES whether there is, in fact, any Dark Energy activity at all. Last I heard, DE was discovered to be, probably, a product of a pervasive miscalibration. I have not heard of any retraction or rebuttal. The recognition coincides with evaporation of galactic rotation curves as an indication of Dark Matter, also not, to my knowledge, rebutted. Cosmology is not unique in systematically ignoring evidence against the existence of its favorite phenomena -- Nessie and Bigfoot fans, either -- but its claims are the biggest.
- ceejayoz 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy doesn't contain the word "calibration" at all, so perhaps you could cite a source?
- rnd420_69 5y agoHuh? There is zero argument about the existence of dark energy in the scientific community. It's existence is obvious because you can actively see galaxies accelerating, on average, away from each other in all kinds of datasets observing the sky. The questions are all about what actually causes it / the mechanism behind it, and details about its workings.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- T-A 5y ago> There is zero argument about the existence of dark energy in the scientific community. https://www.wired.com/story/does-dark-energy-really-exist-cosmologists-battle-it-out/ https://www.wired.com/story/does-dark-energy-really-exist-co... > It's existence is obvious because you can actively see galaxies accelerating, on average, away from each other in all kinds of datasets observing the sky. No. Acceleration is inferred by fitting observed values of other quantities to the Friedmann equations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy#Evidence_of_existence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy#Evidence_of_existe... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann_equations
- cheese_van 5y agoMost working astronomers doing original work (often looking for "something weird) do their own coding. That always impresses me. I have hard enough time with code but these guys not only code but do hard science. "Damn" I say under my breath, "that rules".
- MattGaiser 5y agoLots of scientists in general. I help a neuroscientist friend with his from time to time and was surprised at how much custom code is running in his lab.
- brainwipe 5y agoIt's nice to have a comet named after you right up to the point when you realise it's en-route to Earth! Mum and Dad were so proud... (It's not)
- sigmaprimus 5y agoOh great another comet...Neo-wise was the harbinger for COVID-19. I wonder what kind of doom this thing is bringing us for 2031?